An early look at our mobile development

At the Code Control Festival in Leicester England this past weekend we gave attendees an advance peek at some of our mobile projects. Sam Tarakajian, our principal mobile developer, showed a new iPad app, the Mira controller for Max, that makes it possible, with as close to zero configuration as possible, to make your patch “touchable.” Mira presents a large set of Max user interface elements on the iPad exactly as they appear in your patch. It also provides access to multitouch and accelerometer data. We’ll be revealing more of this powerful addition to the Max universe as we prepare it for release in the app store later this spring.

As a possible companion to Mira, I revealed a new “hardware” project dubbed the MiraBox — in reality, nothing more than an 8 x 10 wooden picture frame stuffed with foam — that helps capture accelerometer and gyro data from the iPad. The software component of the project was prototyped entirely with Mira and Max 6. Like many others we’re interested in extracting higher-level gestures from accelerometer sensors, but in particular, we’re interested in tracking data when you touch your patch.

Hi everyone. Some great questions, and we’re super excited to see that you guys are interested in Mira. For now, we’re not ready to reveal any further information about the product, except that you can expect the first release to be in the next few months. We hope you’ll stay tuned as we finish up and give you more detailed info when we’re ready. Thanks!

Victoria Sog

April 1, 2013 | 5:00 am

Thank you for interestinf news, but can yoy tekk whaen exactly the Mira app will be released, or at least where to check for it. i for sure don;t want to miss it and hope to be among the first to try!

rrr00bb

April 3, 2013 | 11:26 am

"Good ideas, but I have approximately zero interest in buying an iPad. What about Android devices?" – I know it sucks that there are so few good music apps available for Android, but it’s almost entirely a technical issue with Android devices that caused this state of affairs. The latency on Android devices is comically bad. It’s so bad that there is no point in trying to make an interactive music instrument, which needs an audio frame rate of about 200hz for 44.1khz audio (roughly 5ms latency though this is mostly important to keep jitter down under this threshold, contrast this to a mere 30hz frame rate for video). Then you need to add touch latency/jitter as well. This is why there is such a good selection of music apps on iOS – they haven’t goofed this critical, critical thing. Mobile devices ARE real-time signal processors – and iOS started out its life as an audio player from the first day, they didn’t start out as throughput-oriented servers (which trade latency for throughput) scaled down to fit on a phone.

As on a stage when Max was ported to Windows, it was mentioned, that it should be easier to port Max to Linux than to Windows, I’d wonder if the whole Max application can be ported to Android, which is a Linux derivate. Tablets and smartphones are now available with speeds comparable to lets say an old Powerbook. I had an early version of my monster patch running on those. Thats plenty of possibilities already…
The moment a Linux version of Max is available, I’d happily install Linux on my Macbook Air and let go OS X for ever…
The future is about freedom, Microsoft and Apple will need most likely a decade more to recognize it, (as the still suck out profitably those part of the world which don’t know much about freedom). The moment they will realize it, its too late…;-)
You can even talk out loud as many subversive ideas as you have, the world of "deals and finances" is completely blind in that area…)
As artists we should work hard to change this world…

Yes, Android please. Mira doesn’t seem to be an audio application so Android’s inherently bad audio latency isn’t a problem at all in this case. Touch wise they perform flawless on today’s top and middle end models so there’s no excuse if you want to earn some money and listen to more of your user base.

i dont really know sometimes im expecting the mobile version of max or a kind of connections that coding for the mobile devices, but should I look a little further that mobile OS maybe merge together with traditional equipment ?
but now i have to try to adapt the "mobile platform" .